9:07a
What am I doing. This is an excellent question. Busy busy week. Well, I was sick, so for a while I was doing nothing aside from sleeping, taking lots of drugs, sleeping some more, more drugs, then bed for the night. Also lots of coughing and blowing my nose and eating pudding. But this is now over and I feel functional again.
I've started taking yoga class, clearly a very good thing for me. The teacher is a head shorter than I am and very good with verbal as well as physical description of the movements. And it's all very calm and quiet and muted in the actual room. The class is at the Quaker house which in itself is interesting. There are some kids' drawings/writings of the ten commandments in the stairwell; I like seeing "Thou shalt not commit adultery" with backward Ds and awkward sizing, falling off the edge of the page. First grade writing on rough paper.
I'm not very good at standing on one foot slowly. I can do it if I do it quickly but this seems not to be the point somehow. Hee.
Other. John and I are going to his boar-hunting uncle's wedding on Saturday. Family business. This should be interesting. I got to have that excuse to buy a dress, which is silly but it was still a nice thing to have. So now I have a red dress that actually touches the tops of my feet. I've never found one that was actually that long before (I'm too tall to buy clothes). It's very exciting.
Then Wednesday 19th I am leaving for PEI and the L.M. Montgomery conference. I get to stay in the dorm, woohoo. This means: bring a fan. It should be a good conference and I have lots of people I want to talk to. It was strange last time because there were two distinct groups there: the serious academics and the LMM fans. I was in this strange place between the groups, being an academic but not having done any real work on LMM at that point. Now I wonder where I'm going to fall. Probably slightly to the academic side, although this may be wishful thinking. I get back Monday night, and am fully expecting to collapse entirely and have issues going to work the next day.
I have to reread all my LMM books, and bring whatever I can't finish with me so I can read them at night. This is going to require some large head-wresting, since I've been hip-deep in Jane Austen for the last two weeks. Last week Pride and Prejudice and Emma, this week Persuasion, Mansfield Park and this biography of Austen by her 71-year-old Victorian nephew. That's a strange thing to get my head around as well. I have George Eliot Scenes of Clerical Life waiting for me in my bag as well, but she may just have to wait somehow.
Everybody's been freaking out over the Stanley Cup (this being Detroit). Personally I don't care about any sports but Cleveland baseball, but whatever.
If you live in Ann Arbor, you should go over to the Arb and see the peony garden. It's off the Washington Heights entrance. I went the other night at 9, when it was just starting to get dark, and it was all cool and nice. The peonies are very satisfying as well. Big double blooms the size of small cantaloupe, or tight fists of buds starting to unfold. The garden is right in the middle of blooming now, so you should go fairly soon.